Hospitality For The Digital Age

It’s no secret that customer expectations are fundamentally changing the guest experience throughout the hospitality industry. Anyone who has traveled recently can attest to the dramatic way the hospitality industry has changed over the past couple of years, largely in response to increasingly demanding guest expectations. These expectations have been heightened by the ease and simplicity of technologies like mobile, cloud, and social media, which have helped companies in other industries deliver instant access and services based on predictive analytics.

The goal is to help customers where and when they need it, according to Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle’s hospitality group. “Hotels and restaurants are moving beyond reactive service,” he says. “They want to deliver a real-time, personalized guest experience using the data they’ve gathered from multiple channels.”

For example, innovative hotels are ditching tedious check-in lines in favor of a streamlined process built around guest preferences. Guests can check in while being escorted to their rooms, or even while en route from the airport. Other examples of this new type of service include walking guests to their cabs while checking them out, and accessing flight status information warning them of traffic jams.

The guest experience revolution is about far more than technology, however—it fundamentally changes the business conversation at a strategic level. Yes, companies can gain enormous benefits from the data being gathered by all those smart phone apps, lobby sensors, and social media posts, but they must do so within the context of a vision that has been rebuilt around the guest. “It’s about knowing your customer and creating a personalized experience for them, and companies are establishing enterprisewide digital business strategies in order to deliver,” says Webster.

Not surprisingly, such a fundamental change has spawned some fascinating shifts throughout the industry. Here are a few of the more interesting plot twists.

Personalization requires integration: Guests don’t think in terms of line-of-business functions, so why organize information in silos? Putting guest engagement first requires companies to understand the guest as an individual, making systems integration vital. For example, most leading hotel chains integrate their restaurant food and beverage and leisure systems with other hotel applications, such as property management, in order to build a complete guest profile. “They are integrating that data as a key element in the digital strategy,” says Bernard Jammet, senior vice president for hotels at Oracle. Once that information is aggregated, it can be served to and accessed by guests using their mobile devices, allowing them to do things like book a spa treatment or check their bill any time during their stay.

Mobile also plays a big part in allowing guests to personalize their experience using their own devices. For example, at some hotels, guests can plug their devices into the in-room TVs and sound systems so that they can easily access media of their choosing. “There’s a growing expectation for mobile services that deliver personalization,” says Jammet. “This is a big focus for many of our customers right now.”

Data drives a consistent guest experience: Consistency remains one of the biggest challenges for hotels and food and beverage operators when it comes to the guest experience. It takes a lot of work to create and manage a successful restaurant, so how do you repeat that success in a chain of tens or hundreds of restaurants and bars? The answer is to let your technology do the work. Rather than storing information on an isolated, on-premises point-of-sale system at each location, restaurant chains are moving onto cloud applications that can be deployed and accessed globally—with the added bonus of simplifying IT management. “It’s a major trend designed to improve the guest experience,” says Dale Grant, senior vice president for food and beverage at Oracle. “Companies can leverage better and more centralized reporting to analyze all sorts of issues, from guest preferences to food costs.” One restaurant chain, for example, uses a cloud application to track and manage data on the suppliers it uses around the world. “Their brand reputation depends on knowing what ingredients are being used and where they’ve come from,” says Grant. “This gives them a global view of what’s happening in the supplier pipeline.”

Brand recognition depends on direct relationships: Brand recognition is key to customer loyalty, and online travel agents (OTAs) are spending billions on brand building, often at the expense of hotels, says Jammet. “I was on a plane the other day and a lady in front of me was talking about the fantastic Expedia hotel she was staying at,” he says. Needless to say, this is not what hotel operators want to hear. Not only do they lose insight into their customers’ travel preferences, but they also surrender 20% of the room rate to the OTA fee. Not surprisingly, hotels are using digital technology to fight back through improved loyalty programs, better guest recognition via analytics, and guest-facing apps. By improving customer "stickiness," they also improve the chance that guests will book a room directly with the hotel.

“The guest engagement landscape is going to fundamentally change over the next three or four years,” says Jammet, as stronger connections with the customer become a competitive requirement. Customers, ultimately, should be the big winners here. They’ll see an increasingly broad range of services, customized to their preferences, from hospitality enterprises that are revolutionizing the guest experience.